What happens when we examine medicine not just as science, but as shaped by the same forces that created interlocking systems of racial dispossession in housing, education, employment, policing, and incarceration? Drawing on accounts from anthropologists, historians, artists, physicians, journalists, philosophers, and epidemiologists, students will learn to use narrative accounts and concepts in both Africana Studies and the medical humanities to explore the conditions that create illness and disease. Throughout the semester, our seminar discussions will examine successful models of community care, grassroots organizations that have developed innovative health practices, and centers led by Black midwives. Students will also reimagine what medical practice and education might become when refracted through a different analytic lens, one that values the core insights of Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other marginalized thinkers. Perhaps in this work of reimagining, we might begin to understand what it takes to build equitable health systems.

This course delves into the intersections of art, culture, and public health, particularly Hip Hop as a form of public health knowledge acquisition. Through an examination of various texts, archives, and research methods such as ethnography, autobiography, and social and oral history, students will explore how different forms of creative and cultural expression force us to reimagine what health justice looks like, feels like, and sounds like. Central to our exploration is attention to sound and the body — how so much of life is constituted through what we hear, how we listen. The structure of this course is largely organized around an independent multimodal project, where students will create a sonic map that investigates how sound makes up our lives, how it structures our cities and neighborhoods, and how it shapes the ways we feel and move through the world.

How might we theorize otherwise when the very documents that preserve history also function as instruments of erasure? What does it mean to make poetry from the past? This course explores different methods for engaging with the archive. Students will explore how poets, artists, and scholars use primary source materials — letters, photographs, legal records, oral histories, medical case files — to create new kinds of historical writing. Through experimental workshops, students will also practice techniques of fragmentation, juxtaposition, and erasure to create their own documentary poems using found texts, newspaper clippings, historical documents, and other source materials.

What does it mean to love—deliberately, politically, rhythmically—under conditions of precarity, displacement, and exhaustion? How does love shape legislation, organize communities, and drive political movements? What does love do for the body? How does love structure who we eat with, grieve with, fight for, and tend to? This course positions love not as a private sentiment, but as both a research methodology and strategic form of political action. Drawing from Black studies, performance theory, feminist thought, and critical data studies, students will examine love across multiple analytic scales: from saved voicemails and lullabies to photographs tucked into wallets and letters never sent. Moving between the quantitative and the qualitative, the archive and the body, students will interrogate those critical gaps between ‘countable’ institutional metrics and the depths of our affective lives. In doing so, we might be able to build a world accountable to both. 

From Batman’s crimefighting in Gotham to the gritty realities of precinct politics in Law and Order, stories of heroes and villains have become central to how people understands justice, policing, and punishment. This course examines how superhero narratives, crime procedurals, and prison dramas shape our collective imagination about law enforcement and incarceration. Students will analyze how contemporary media — from Netflix’s Daredevil and HBO’s The Penguin to long-running series like Law and Order — constructs ideas about good and evil, vigilante justice and institutional authority, and rehabilitation and retribution. By examining these popular representations alongside current events and policy debates, students will engage in critical discussions about the very nature of justice itself: How is justice represented? What does justice mean? Who gets to define it?